“No, it’s not expensive, look, they’re half price,” Anna corrects him, “it’s a sale.”
Clothes are a compulsive passion of Anna’s. She follows fashion closely, knows how to work it, mix trends. Beside her, Yves slightly tarnishes the picture, with his walking shoes and his old duffel coat. She would like to dress him from head to foot, make him “sharp,” elegant. She already influences him: he sometimes wears fine shoes, dark shirts, pants with front pleats. Watching Anna in a boutique, her unselfconscious display of narcissism, amuses Yves far more than it annoys him. He senses that she wants to know just how far he will tolerate this addiction, this fondness for what she calls “an aesthetic” and which she has no intention of losing.
Anna likes being attractive, and does not want to give that up now or later, when age catches up with her. She admires those women who fight every step of the way, and still want to resist the injustices of time in their sixties. She sees nothing ridiculous about wanting to appear twenty years old right to the end. She is vigilant. One lunchtime, when Anna is walking arm in arm with Yves on the rue Oberkampf, they bump into a girlfriend of hers. The woman is still young, very slim, athletic-looking. A sudden ray of sunlight is cruel to her: in its glare, from that angle, the woman’s white skin looks like fragile ancient parchment. Anna shudders. They have barely said goodbye to the woman before Anna rushes into a pharmacy to buy some hydrating cream.
Another day, because she does not have enough time to go up to his apartment and she “doesn’t want to make love in five minutes,” he joins her downstairs, in her car. She suggests they just go for a drink in the café across the street. She takes out her bright red lipstick, eases it onto her lower lip, closes her mouth to spread it, then assesses the result in the rearview mirror. Now enhanced, she looks at him.
“Do you want me to do my eye makeup as well?”
He thinks she looks perfect.
“The actress Romy Schneider always put on makeup when her husband suggested they go out,” she adds, “even just for lunch in the restaurant downstairs.”
Mirrors are important. There are three of them in Yves’s apartment: the big one above the fireplace in the living room, the small one in the bathroom, over the sink, and the last one, a tall full-length mirror, in the bedroom, on the door of a closet. When Anna has to go home, each of them plays its part. First, in the bathroom, she checks the small details, then looks at the bigger picture in the bedroom, and finally proceeds to a general inspection in the living room.
He wonders whether this preoccupation with appearance could come between them one day. Anna’s father is right, though: you fall in love with the flaw. Yves knows this. In his apartment he has a wall light that he commissioned from a sculptor friend, and when it first arrived he was disappointed. He did not dislike it, but it was not what he expected. Now, though, that is partly what he likes about this wall light. It never quite manages to disappear, it is a palpable presence. He does not want a woman who blends in with the background either. Besides, Anna is many things, but not a wall light.
Anna cannot make up her mind between two dresses, one in pink and green, short, very 1960s Courrèges, and a longer, more sensible one in gray and red. The pretty blond woman beside her is facing the same dilemma.
“It really is very pretty,” says Anna, who has tried on the shorter one, “but I can’t wear it for work, and I’d never dare go out in it.”
“Well, I’ll buy it then,” says Louise, laughing, “I’ll wear it at the law courts under my long black robes.”
ANNA AND YVES
• •
SOME NIGHTS when Stan is on duty at the Quinze-Vingts, Yves drops in to see Anna on the rue Érasme, after she has put the children to bed. She cooks dinner for two and spends the evening in his arms, always worried Karl might wake and catch them together.
One evening, Anna takes Yves to her bedroom. She opens a closet, eases out three dusty shoe boxes, and carries them to the kitchen. In them are hundreds of photographs. She lays out her life before Yves, perhaps for him. It is a long time since she has looked inside these boxes.
He recognizes her in the dark-haired little girl in overalls using every inch of her body to thrust a swing into the blue of the sky; in the girl on the brink of adolescence dancing with her father, almost like a woman in love. In another she is wearing a white dress, sitting in a boat on a pond in a landscaped garden. The picture could have been taken in the 1920s. Yves recognizes the man holding the oars. He is a writer. “Isn’t that Hugues Léger with you, in that boat?”
“It is. Do you know him?”
“Not very well. I really like his books, we used to have the same publisher.”
“He and I were together, for a year. We’re still friends. I could get you together for dinner if you like.”
She continues rummaging through the boxes, takes out photographs of her wedding, pointing things out, making comments. Yves thinks that, in front of him, with him, Anna is drawing up the inventory of everything she is preparing to lose. Right now, she is asking him to find the words that will help her draw on her own strength to give up what each photo says. Look at this happiness, my happiness, my husband, my house, my children, my parents, look. It’s all there, spread out on this kitchen table, years of life in fading colors, I give them to you, I’ll abandon them for you, my love. But what about you, what are you offering? Tell me that.
Anna is afraid she will never “be able to do it.” Sometimes, in order to convince herself, she cites Jane Birkin, Romy Schneider, other women — often actresses — who had several significant men in their lives; what Anna actually says is “several lives,” as if each man counted as a life. She looks for role models, examples, who say, Yes, she has a right to this too. Because it is something she is owed.
But she has her doubts.
“You know,” she says one evening when they are in the car, “I worry so much about not being able to do it. I often just tell myself: Anna, don’t. Do it.”
Yves bursts out laughing. “Did you hear what you just said? You said, ‘Don’t do it.’ ”
Anna did hear herself. All her ambivalence is in those words. “Don’t. Do it” or “Don’t do it.” All down to a period and the subconscious.
HUGUES AND YVES
• •
I DON’T KNOW if I have a best friend. Sometimes I can wake up and not know how old I am. I’ve set my clock ten minutes fast to make sure I leave on time, but I now take the extra ten minutes into account, which cancels them out. I’d like to write a book with the title A Book Not Worth Reading and have it published by a company called Minor Press in a collection known as Complete Obscurity, so that I can say: “I had a book not worth reading published in complete obscurity by a minor press.” I was once left by a woman, and I cut my mattress in two, so that I didn’t have to sleep on her side. I can never find my keys when I have to go out in a hurry. I like the pillow to be cool when I go to bed. I once knew a man called Deadman who introduced himself like this: “Deadman, like dead man without the gap.” I will go to hell. I’ve watched the image of the tsunami unleashing itself onto the Indonesian coast at least ten times on television. I own sneakers, tennis shoes, climbing boots (worn only twice), lace-up walking boots, black moccasins, elegant black shoes, slippers, rubber-soled sandals, and yellow flippers. I know that my favorite film isn’t a very good film. I often wonder what would be different about the world if I didn’t exist.